Is second life Free Software?
The fallowing article speaks as though second life is Free Software. Is this true? If so, why is it not in the Trisquel repositories?
I guess, as there are many parts of second life, I am referring to the viewer.
Is the second life viewer Free Software?
Thank you.
This software is not in Ubuntu's repositories (that Trisquel uses as a base) and, as far as I know, no DEB exists for recent versions of this viewer. So even if it is Free software, that would explain why it is not in Trisquel's repositories.
Second Life is technically Software as a Service (as the server uses proprietary software to manage the game objects) making it nonfree.
Linden Lab has said that they will release both the client and the server as FOSS when the protocol becomes more standardized.
There is something called OpenSimulator, a BSD licensed server for SL, but it requires the patent encumbered Mono.
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It's not SaaS just because it involves a server, or even proprietary software on a server. SaaS is when a program on a server does the same job over the web that a local program can do. For example, using Google Docs instead of Libre Office. Google Docs is SaaS because it takes the place of a locally installed program. Second Life is more or less a glorified internet forum, and those aren't SaaS because they involve many people getting together and communicating (i.e. not something that can be done purely on your own machine).
Sorry, my wording was screwed up. To clarify (from Wikipedia:)
"Each server instance runs a physics simulation to manage the collisions and interactions of all objects in that region. Objects can be nonphysical and non moving, or actively physical and movable. Complex shapes may be linked together in groups of up to 255 separate primitives. Additionally, each player's avatar is treated as a physical object so that it may interact with physical objects in the world.[55] As of 1 April 2008, Second Life simulators use the Havok 4 physics engine for all in-world dynamics. This engine is capable of simulating thousands of physical objects at once.[56]"
(Havok is proprietary.)
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I can't tell if havok is used on the client side or the server side, but that quote implies that it's on the server. What software is on the server is irrelevant as far as it concerns freedom, because it's not on our computer.
As far as server side goes, what matters is what kind of computing is done where, where data is stored, whether the users have control over their data, etc. I know little about Second Life so I can't answer these questions.
According to Wikipedia, the Second Life engine has proprietary and free parts.
It also says that "Linden Lab pursues the use of open standards technologies, and uses free and open source software such as Apache, MySQL, Squid and Linux.[57] The plan is to move everything to open standards by standardizing the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, former CTO[58] of Second Life, has stated that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as free and open source software.[59]"
So it looks like they're moving in the direction of being entirely free software, but they're not there yet.
As far as just the viewer is concerned, Wikipedia says it's open source, and it has two citations for that, but neither one seems to work anymore.
I went and downloaded the viewer from their website, and it includes a file called licenses.txt, which lists a whole bunch of licenses used for the viewer. I skimmed the file, and they seemed to be free software licenses, though I didn't read it very closely.